


Prompt: Tenets

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [40]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Analysis, Codependency, Gen, Meta Analysis in Fic, relationship analysis, relationship dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 18:31:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5976892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are mirrors to each other, complementary opposites, and Pietro, when they had begun this pattern at ten, had done it with the simple aim of keeping Wanda safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt: Tenets

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/139121565190/i-dont-want-to-impose-or-anything-so-whichever-of).

**i.**  
They are a they and have always been a they. For as long as they can remember they have been two, and even standing alone they know, in their hearts, their twin is there with them.

That’s the first thing people get wrong about them.

Others think that talking to one of them is talking to one, and not half of a whole. Others think of them as two distinct creatures, two beings separate, when, in truth, they are halves of a whole and have been all their lives. Have been as long as they remember.

They are a they.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
The second thing they get wrong about them is who is stronger. 

Some people assume it is Wanda, because of them she decides their path, guiding them through streets and school and study, through people and protests and police. Some people think it is Pietro, so fiercely protective of her. When they gain their powers it is harder still for others to guess who is stronger, with Wanda’s tearing scarlet and Pietro’s tearing speed.

In the end only they seem to understand that they are as strong as each other, for they take their strength from the other.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
The third thing people get wrong about them is the nature of their closeness. People assume romance or jealousy or possessiveness, assume that Pietro is tied to Wanda more strong than she is to him, assume this and that and this other about them without ever seeing the truth.

They are halves of each other, halves of a whole greater than either of them alone. They are a _they_ , belonging only to each other. There is no need for jealousy or possessiveness - why would there be? That would hurt them. There is no romance - why would there be? They are twins, first and foremost, and many would hurt them if they were close in that way.

They will do anything for each other, though, and that is something people _do_  get right.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Pietro understands how they are intrinsically, inherently, just as Wanda does. They dance around each other perfectly, in an eternal constant balance, Wanda guiding, he guarding, both understanding each other in a way that no one else ever can, ever will. Pietro knows his sister, how she plans for his protection even as he provides hers, how she considers others thoughts and actions and how it will affect them, how she looks outwards to all other than them and acts inwards towards them, just as he does the very inverse, watching inwards for their wellness and acting outwards for their protection.

They are mirrors to each other, complementary opposites, and Pietro, when they had begun this pattern at ten, had done it with the simple aim of keeping Wanda safe.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
There are simple chains of logic in all that they do. As simple as they are complex, as binding as they are freeing, the three basic tenets of their continued happiness. To guard their happiness, to guard their lives, to guard their vengeance. Simple and interlocked and intertwined, and the certainty on which they have built everything they are.

Wanda knows them and knows them well, the only chains she has ever let herself be bound by. When others said street children would always fail in school Wanda had decided _no_  as soon as they had taken to the streets. _No_ , she had decided. _We will best as many as we can_. 

 _Orphans are always unhappy_ , their schoolmates had said. _No_ , she had decided, and had made Pietro laugh again.

 _No one can take down Tony Stark_  everyone had claimed. _No,_  she had decided. _He shall pay for what he has done_.

Maybe they were chains, of a sort, but Wanda could see how they each tied back into their triple tenets, their binding ties. _Orphans are always unhappy_  - but they would guard their happiness. _Street children will always fail_  - but they would guard their lives with wisdom. _Tony Stark is untouchable_  - then they would find a way to reach him.

Everything tied back to their tenets (later Wanda would think _everything tied back to our trauma_ ). It made it easy to volunteer.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
Pietro supposes that, when it comes to strength, their strengths are in different things. He is strong physically, he is strong mentally, and his emotions are entirely broken, bound as he has made them, to Wanda’s every whim and need. Wanda is weak physically, takes traumas far harder than he, but has a certainty and a free strength of emotion he lacks without her guidance. His only certainty is her, while she finds certainty in a myriad things he cannot understand.

He wonders, sometimes, if that was his sacrifice, to be able to protect Wanda as well as he does. He can see threats, he can see weaknesses, he can see what Wanda needs and find it or be it as is required, but without her he has no certainty, without her he has no purpose, for he had made her his polestar, his guiding light. (He hides this from Wanda, the only thing he tucks away from her knowing, lest she waste worry on him alone rather than on them as a whole.)

Wanda’s powers he thinks, when he learns of them feeling her scarlet peeling its way into his mind, are both the best and worst things for her. They are her, down to their every part, the ability to know without knowing, to understand inherently, to make things move without touching them herself, they are her, in every aspect. They turn outwards by turning inwards.

They hurt her though, they hurt her though, and it is easy for Pietro to ignore his bruises from running into the walls when he can feel her mind screaming against the press of everyone else’s.

(He learns to shout her name to her, to wrap his mind around hers, to buffer her from the screaming, shouting voices he cannot hear. He learns to make his mind dance in total silence, so Wanda can read his thoughts in peace when her head burns with a migraine. He learns everything she needs him to, without her ever asking. He prefers it that way.)

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
Pietro’s speed, Wanda thinks, is perfect for him. Speed and strength are all he has ever sought in order to better protect her, they are what he wants, are what he identifies as more than anything, the tools he believes he must have to protect Wanda with all his might

Once he learns to relax into his speed rather than try to push it his happy laughter lifts her heart.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
The Baron and the Doctor do not seem to quite understand them, nor why they lived when no others did, nor why they got powers, nor how nor why they got the powers they did. 

The twins know, as surely as they know each other, the way, the how, the werefore art thou of their powers. They are grateful that they have this understanding and the Baron and Doctor do not, for it means they are allowed to see one another when nothing else will calm them or their powers. When Pietro cannot still for shaking Wanda is allowed to hold him until he sleeps, when Wanda screams at all the voices in her head it is Pietro who cradles her and wraps her mind with his until the other minds fall silent.

It is Pietro who helps Wanda change her perception from hearing minds to seeing them, allowing her to watch as she chooses rather than hear regardless. They are taken apart when Wanda starts to cry, but the twins both know they are tears of joy and not sadness or stress.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
When Wanda feels Pietro ripped from her it is as though all the screaming minds she now sees have started to shout again. She can feel him, feel the bullets tearing through his skin and muscle and organs and bones, feel the pain, feel the bond tearing as his mind tries to stay, tries to stay with each gasped breath and she grips and _holds_ but death is yet stronger and she feels him fade into void.

There is nothing there to hold to and she _screams_.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
She can feel the worry of the others when the drop into the Cradle room and see Wanda still curled in the corner. It swirls through their minds like an oil slick, shimmering and sickly and a waste of emotion. Wanda would rather they ignored her now, half a being without that which made it complete, and wonders if they see that, see her alone as she does, the living half of a body cut apart.

She doubts it.

There is a sympathy, of a kind, in some of the minds around her (and how it hurts to think of herself as her alone, rather than the her of her-and-him, of their twinship!), a skein of understanding as delicate and soft as silk, ivory and indigo at once. It is very nearly her brother’s colours, and the first time she realises that she is very nearly sick.

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Sometimes one of them will sit with her, but she does not really listen to whatever they have to say. Or well… it is less that she does not listen and more that she _cannot_ , with her mind wrapped up in listening for Pietro’s familiar quiet, the soft humming song of the wings of the birds of his mind, of the wind in the lianas of his tree, of the scampering monkeys. The rest of the world feels less real to her than that, than the quiet of her brother’s mind, getting closer and closer to waking.

She can feel the worry, though, the sickly oil slick, and wishes for the bright blinding blue of her brother to act as a buffer.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
The joy she feels when Pietro wakes - wakes at last and it is him, it is _him,_  his mind bright and blue, the tree reaching between void beneath and cosmos above, lianas stretching far beyond the height of the tree, the birds and monkeys and glowing memory, all him as he ever was - is like nothing else. She can feel her scarlet around her as strong as it was at his death but infinitely more gentle and she cannot tug it in, even if she wanted to she could not, for it is _shining_.

Pietro is in her arms again, they are a _they_  again, and all is as it should be.

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
She can hear their whispered worries now, now that she is not caught up within her brother’s sleeping mind, hear them wondering about Pietro’s devotion and her grief-now-joy, and their closeness.

All worries they have heard before, yes, but ones that almost burn coming from those who should, more than any, understand them.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Pietro can hear their worries but he does not care. Why should he? When it upsets Wanda it is easy to take them somewhere else, to tease her and cheer her. They do not try to tear them apart, they do not, in fact, do anything. Occasionally he hears their speculation but it is not his duty to explain them, nor is it Wanda’s.

If they wish for an explanation of them they can _ask_ , and until then he and Wanda will happily be how they have ever been.

 

* * *

 

 **xv.  
** In the end they don’t really need to explain themselves to the others. They ask a few gently probing questions - with the exception of Vision who seems to accept them as they are without hesitation or query - but most of them seem to understand the effects of trauma in binding people together as firmly as, or even more than the bonds of blood.

The only thing they do not quite understand is Wanda, and it is a simple thing for them to explain how she can see the twists and turns of their moving minds.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always much appreciated!


End file.
